What Makes a Popular Book?

If you’ve ever read through a few classic books,
you may have noticed some discrepancies.

Some are engaging, deep, or easy to read, while others seem so bad you wonder how people ever enjoyed them.

But why is that?

What exactly about these books that makes them enjoyable or unbearable?

What allows some books to hold up through the year while others fall out of favor?

To investigate the popularity of classic books in the modern day, we will be looking at 19 novels and stories published around the 19th century and comparing their features and current popularity based on modern Goodreads ratings.

We will start by examining the structure of these books.

Rating by Length of book

Here we can see that well rated books generally tend to be longer.
But we should take a closer look.

There is an upward trend the the points, suggesting a possible relationship.
However, we can’t be sure given that moving just a few points disturbs this trend.

Paragraph Length

Longer paragraph seem linked to more poorly rated books








The scatterplot corroborates this.


There appears to be a trend for book with longer paragraphs to be less popular.
This pattern holds up even if a few points are removed.

Word length

There’s a loose trend of books with shorter words being higher rated, but it isn’t strong enough to be reliable.

Dialog

There’s some trend of books with more dialog being higher rated, though not always reliable.

While we were able to identify some trends for book rating from the structural data, it certainly leaves a lot unexplained.

How about the book “demographics”? Could this tell us more?

Author Gender

Not much to be seen here

Year of Publication

No clear trends here either

So book demographics didn’t clear much up

Could the emotional content of book explain more about their popularity?

Positive vs Negative Emotion scale

The ratings show no clear preference for positive or negative language alone.

But what if we look at individual emotions?

Emotional scores of the books

Some emotions have a clear correlation with Rating,
like joy, anticipation, and trust

But others are more complicated,
like anger, disgust, and sadness

Looking at the points as a whole, the relationship doesn’t look strong.

However, if we exclude 5 specific books the rest follow a strong trend.

In fact, those books are similarly located for all of the emotional scores.

Could the overall quantity of emotion be an important predictor?

It seems that this phenomena is limitted to just these few books rather than being a general trend

So then, why are books like Brothers Karamazov and Anne of Green Gables so much high rated than other similar books?

Lets compare the emotional composition of Anne of Green Gables and The Awakening. Both are dramas with a young women protagonist, written by female authors around the end of the 19th century. However, Anne of Green Gables was an immediate hit and remains highly rated today, while the Awakening was criticized when first published, only gained some popularity later in the 20th century and remains lower rated today.

Here we can see that Anne of Green Gables has some features that were more associated with higher rating, such as higher word count, lower word length, and more dialog.

However, it also has longer paragraphs which was more associated with lower ratings.

Anne of Green Gables	The Awakening
4.31	3.68
1908	1899
Female	Female
93740	45270
39	40
4.96	5.21
56.54	44.89
0.4914	0.3476

We can see some of the patterns from before in looking at these two books. Like…. But this isn’t enough to explain the changes in popularity. Why was the Awakening critized when it first came out, why was it revived later? Simply looking at an overview of structure and emotion isn’t enough to explain it. In cases like this, understanding the context is essential.